skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Miracles, believe in them
http://jamielambhilton.blogspot.com/
Greed killed the Olympics. The downfall began in Los Angeles 1984.
Some tips I learned over the years on how to be a successful affiliate marketer
Is this like on a public computer at your campus? Or is it your personal machine connected to the college network? If it's the latter, it seems odd to me that a college would filter your results for your personal machine.
No Resume? No Problem? Your Social Stream Says It All
How the Aakash tablet bounced back
STEM Jobs Act: Your Chance TO FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS
Samsung S3 Sales continue to do well despite/because of the iPhone 5
Einstein’s derivation of E=mc^2 revisited
Who is right or wrong (she or the firm), it is hard for outsiders to decide without knowing the facts. But what is very very sad is the fact that much of the "civilized" society accepts that:

1. Employers can treat their employees like crap, not many people seem to be bothered by it. But when a employee says anything even remotely bad, suddenly he/she is unprofessional, immature etc

2. In the case of whistle blowers, we spend more time arguing the behavior of the whistle blower (aka the "correct" way of whistle blowing) than actually looking into the allegations.

So in short, even if I (the whistle blower) have a legitimate case (racism, ageism, sexism...whatever), then I am expected to act totally "professional" if I ever expect to be taken seriously.
A new Apple iOS Wi-Fi problem has popped up while others remain unfixed
A Better College Ranking Algorithm
Both. So what can we do?

Resisting oppression calls for courage. If you merely complain or protest you may be tracked down and threatened. If you go beyond that to active resistance you definitely run the risk of being labelled a criminal or terrorist and put in a cage.

Resisting distraction is a whole lot easier. It just requires self-discipline, and a willingness to say no the the bait. Don't use a bank, credit card, television, or unfree software. Don't buy industrially processed or GMO food. Opt out.

Yes, it involves sacrifice, and other people will mock you, but if you are short on bravery, what else can you do?

EDIT: Forgot this: Do not vote.
I just recently got out of an accelerator and the biggest thing I saw in the program was teams either able to execute or not able to execute. This makes a world of difference.

Also, figuring out your priorities as far as design first, just get something out there, etc. but whatever it is make sure everyone agrees on the time and methodology, ie design first will take longer.

Another big one, and one I got screwed over on, was finish all the legal paperwork in a program like this as early as possible. Make sure to sign your employee agreement and pay/equity agreement if you're getting it. Do this early on so everyone is on the same page and is clear about what's going on. I was cofounding and just this last Sunday got terminated after spending the last 4 months working on it. No cause or notice and almost without pay (still working on this). Always fear the worst and never think it won't happen to you.
Planet Earth is a big place, and its inhabitants managed to reach both of those destinies at the same time. There are places where people live like Orwell predicted, and then there is this so called "First World", which looks exactly like Huxley's vision portrayed by this comic.

The real question is: how do we fix both of those states?
This article ruined the Olympics for me, at least until they get their act together. I had heard a lot about the points made while the games were going on, but it didn't feel like swallowing the pill I just swallowed.
If I overestimate it, why do all python devs I talk to still use 2.x and say that they can't use 3.x because all kind of problems?
I decided to write a follow up to my earlier article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427864 that many have found lacking.
Forget the keyboard. Those of us hauling an iPad everywhere don't need anything else except a minimal phone which is nothing more than a phone. The simple act of calling still hasn't been perfected the way Apple could do it, esp. if paired to a tablet. Give us an iPhone Nano which auto-syncs contact lists, displays call info on a tablet (if that's on), voice dials, VoIPs to non-POTS audio communications (say: uses Skype or FaceTime's audio to contact someone via email address), has dead-simple configuration, forgoes everything not related to making a voice (or perhaps video) call.

Seriously, has anyone in the industry tried to get a "just a phone" that isn't an inch thick and downright obnoxious to use? Last time I did, the Verizon clerk had to dig thru the back storeroom to find a 3-year-old "candybar" phone (which tried setting itself on fire a few months later) of tolerable size & minimalism. Closest thing out there is is "John's Phone", which still screws up by insisting on doubling the size for storage space for a paper (!) pad and pencil (!).

Please, Apple, an iPhone Nano. You're my only hope.
Samsung claims Apple patent verdict tainted by jury foreman
> Will this be a default in Rails 4?

Yes.
I had the enormous privilege of having a teacher who assigned both The End of Education and Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman my junior year of high school. I can't recommend them enough; reading them was one of the formative political experiences of my life.

We live in dangerous times; civic engagement and an educated, vibrant population is more important than ever. But our political and cultural discourse has fallen to its lowest point in as long as anyone can remember. If I were not already politically engaged, I might become so if I watched Edward Murrow at night -- but watching CNN these days seems to be no different from watching the Jersey Shore.
None. I never drink coffee, not any kind. Never have, never will.
Looks awfully familiar:

http://agilityjs.com
You should have some free trial to give customers some confidence how good is the product.
I would really be interested in people's thoughts.
At some point you have to relax a little with the side projects and just sit down with a book and read. Maybe go to a park or coffee shop to get a change in scenery so you're not tempted to open the laptop and start coding again. If you take public transportation, your commute's a good time as well.
As technology gets more powerful, the oops factor comes into play. Oops, I dropped a flask in my lab: 1 million people dead. Oops, the SCRAM system for a reactor that's out of control, it had a software bug: 10 million people dead.

Technical people understand how fragile modern systems are. As life gets more complicated, innocent mistakes can turn a country into a desert. Malicious intent raises the body count even higher.
You sound bitter. So other people have thought of and built parts of what jobs' team brought together, ergo Jobs was not a visionary? You can hate Apple and SJ's personality as much as you want, but don't let it blind you. Lisa and Mac invented more over the Xerox UI than you think, plus they got the license from Xerox in a fair deal against shares.
I'm not a Rails guy, so you'll have to forgive ignorance here. Are you telling me that Rails only lets you blacklist parameters, not whitelist?

Because that seems entirely the wrong way around.

EDIT: looked at the link posted elsewhere here[1] and ound that it is possible to whitelist using "attr_accessible". Please tell me people know about and use this.

[1] http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html#mass-assignment
If you can let it run without it taking your time, then let it run. You never know what could happen in 6 months or a year. I have a few websites that I completely ignored and just let run, over time some of them slowly but steadily started generating revenue.
Can you elaborate on why you think invalid API parameters should be silently ignored? I can see arguments for both sides, but none of them would make the API "broken" in my mind.
OUT in IT: Jon “maddog” Hall opens up about being in OUT
He just linked to an article that explains how to do it safely.

update to reply because of downvotes:

1) butterfly knives are very useful tools

2) mass assignment can be used safely out of the box in rails post v3.2.3. To use it, you have to explicitly add parameters to the whitelist or disable the whitelist. The article is there to explain why disabling the whitelist is a bad idea.
Yet again I need to say that I'd happily pay a reasonable amount to avoid ads and get a better layout.

"Free" isn't really free when I'm paying for a bunch of stuff to be downloaded that I neither want nor need. And putting myself at risk from unscrupulous or incompetent ad networks.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this be blocked by device authorization limitations (5 per account)?

For instance, I have a PC, a Macbook Air, iPad, and iPhone; those take up four of the five authorizations. I could theoretically then spend this last one on the friend, sure -- but I'm fairly confident that devices can only be linked with one account at a time.

Furthermore, I'd argue that this issue would only be relevant with relatively expensive Apps. Frankly, I pirate music because most of the stuff I'm looking for is either otherwise unavailable or exorbitantly expensive -- conversely, the amount of effort it takes to pirate a .99c app isn't work the headache and coordination.

I'd argue that this has been Steam's biggest success, as well -- reducing piracy because it's comparatively too much effort.
The opposite is also true. Too often people don't quit when they should because of sunk costs they've invested.
It may be different, yes, and I can relate to the OP's original complaint from his girlfriend. Still, given the language used on the site and the (albeit weird) use of a "credit" that can be used in the future for each month you don't buy something, it doesn't seem unfair at all to me.

I will say that the negative attention this confusion could bring them is more harmful to them than if they revamped the purchase process to just make it crystal clear what you're buying.

From my experience at Poll Everywhere, the "sidebar" on the checkout process does not get read by anyone, anytime. For some reason, the sidebar becomes a blindspot and is ignored (at least in our testing) during a checkout process and so is thus not a great spot to put reminders about how you're joining a membership and will be charged monthly if that is the only place is is put.
Go read "On Writing" by Stephen King. It will make you a better programmer and a better writer.
Blanket accepting POST data to insert into your database is a terrible idea.

Rails gives you attr_accessible and attr_protected to alleviate this problem. Protip: the one from those two that you suggested to use is just as terrible an idea as allowing blind POST into your database. Blacklisting is always the wrong approach to security. I don't care if you have to repeat yourself and type more characters: use the whitelisting of attr_accessible.
You can do either. The default used to be blacklist, but that was changed to whitelist recently.
He can only do that if he has clear legal title to it --- and the issue here is precisely that he's signed a contract which may give the employer first dibs to appropriate it.

(Beyond that, things get into murky "consult a lawyer" territory very quickly --- the precise language of the contract may make a real difference. And so may questions of jurisdiction; California law is more employee-friendly than elsewhere in the US, but you can't necessarily take that to the bank without checking the contract and the circumstances.

Things get a whole lot easier if you can get the employer to sign papers which formally waive their claim on whatever-it-is --- but ideally, you'd consult a lawyer on the wording of the waiver. I've got one for my own open-source side projects, but it hasn't been legally vetted for third-party use, so I'm a bit reluctant to share it...)
You can do either. Whitelist is obviously preferred.
This would be my statement to the writer: Sex for sex' sake is far from mindless, and a child conceived in love is no worse than one who is the product of deliberation and effort. Also, pregnancies are equally likely to be deliberated amongst low-income families, especially in rural societies.
It allows either.
Sure, throw an error, but not a 5xx error. ISE 500 indicates that something went wrong on the server, not on the client. 400 Bad Request maybe?

I, for one, don't like having my application error logs polluted by script kiddies running against my wall...
I don't think there's any such thing as an acceptable amount of time to create a prototype. The amount of passion you have for the idea and the other parts of your life that take your time will feed into how long it will take to create a prototype.

I would say a prototype and a private beta can be synonymous but it is more likely that a prototype would develop into something more substantial which you would then look to publicise and get more feedback from with a private beta.

A prototype is more likely to be along the lines of something you would show to relevant folk on a narrower basis than a private beta, to gauge whether they would be interested in the product.
Writing code in this style is perfectly safe if you do it correctly. GitHub didn't, so the defaults were changed to make it harder to do it incorrectly.

UPDATE: editing to reply since hn won't let me reply directly because the thread is to deep, yet I'm getting downvotes

It's not a tautology. Some things are safe even if you do them wrong. Some things are unsafe no matter how you do them.

Rails changed the defaults so that now you have to deliberately decide to do things unsafely. Rails before 3.2.3 fails un-safe in this scenario, but later versions fail safe. Rails 4 uses a different solution that's even harder to screw up.
Persistence.

As it implies continuous motion and flow of actions towards your startup's growth.
So the iPad and iPhone are retina, but this iPad mini will not be retina? Surprised that a technology author would assume Apple would take a step backward like that.
As several other comments here have pointed out, it's possible for neither bad outcome to happen. Human beings always have frailties and make mistakes, and even take advantage of one another, but the long-term trend line in human society suggests the worries in the submitted article are overblown. By coincidence, the Why Evolution Is True website today has a post that responds to worries like this with actual research by careful scientists who know human nature well.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/03/things-ar...

The Hans Rosling video linked to from that post is familiar to some participants on Hacker News; if you haven't seen it yet, it is well worth a look.
My approach to building a hiring pipeline
This isn't a Rails issue, it can affect any web framework. And it's a security flaw every single time mass assignment is used without whitelisting.
Because they are people, and people as a group are apocalyptic.

Four to five decades back, everyone grew up convinced that atomic war was inevitable. That was the zeitgeist, but wrong. Nuclear war is a great stride forward in that it's the only methodology of war yet invented that is both aggressively pursued by leaders and presents those leaders with a dire and immediate threat of death if used. (As opposed to, say, war by assassination, which only satisfies one of those criteria). So the incentives were aligned against what popular sentiment said was inevitable.

Then all of that determined, grim sentiment sloshed over into the ready and waiting environmentalist hair-shirt death cult after the collapse of the USSR.

As someone who advocates for engineered human longevity, I see a lot of this. Most people, the majority, don't have a positive view of the future. At present that is largely informed by what in a sane world would be extreme environmentalist views, but in this world are middle of the road environmentalist views - most people are convinced that the world is falling apart, that there are too many people, that no-one should be allowed to extend human life, that all resources are running out, and in short that Malthus was right.

This view of the end of the world will no more come to pass than nuclear war did. All the incentives are aligned against Malthusian limits of any sort, and always have been. Hopefully one doesn't have to explain why that's the case to the present audience.
>>> " But our political and cultural discourse has fallen to its lowest point in as long as anyone can remember."

Sure, but what does that really mean? To me, not much, as peoples memories are short.. There are numerous examples in the last few centuries of much, much worse political discourse. Think about the Lincoln-Douglas debates where newspapers that were controlled by political parties would edit the transcripts of the opposing candidate to enhance the standings of their own horse in the race.
Also as technology advances, people in power can use them for their benefit, rather than the benefit of the world as a whole.
The second page consists of only this:

> P.S. Of course I didn’t divorce my wife just because she likes multipage articles. I divorced her because she types two spaces after a period. (Not really.)

Don't know what's that about though..
Is it by design that I have to fork over my email address for a higher resolution screenshot?
I'd also recommend Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror.
Startup Accelerators are an Investment Class not a Mentorship Program
Obviously some major problems with copyrights in the Olympics but "ruined"? Come on...
...and stuff like the Zen of Python is interpreted differently by each individual (ie: your friend's interpretation is much different than mine).

And this is exactly my point about why having the Zen of Python is problematic: it is not in any way definitive, but it is treated as though it is. Meanwhile you have folks like the guy I work with, and folks like you, supposedly in the same community. But your ways of thinking and working couldn't be more different.

Even though I love Ruby (and actually, lately I've been wanting to be in a Clojure shop...) I want to work in a Python shop just to get the bad taste out of my mouth from this gig...

As an addendum, these Python vs. Ruby articles really are a waste of time.

Well, I agree and I disagree. If they turn into stupid flamewars then yes, they are a waste of time. But I like hearing opinions like yours, which I wouldn't have been exposed to outside of this kind of a post.
Even expert rubyists can be fooled by misleading heredoc syntax
Between women's suffrage, the civil rights act and pretty big reductions in corruption, the story of the U.S. from 1900 to the present is one of massive expansion of personal rights.

The last half of the 1800s wasn't so bad either.

(I'm not saying the U.S. does not have corruption, I'm claiming that it has mostly gone down over the time mentioned)
> When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing.

This sounds like a truism to me. Like "the brain stopped working", it's more a definition of death than an explanation of what caused it.

> But I think the underlying cause is usually that they’ve become demoralized.

And this, I suspect, is confusing correlation for causation. The team getting demoralized is a symptom of the company being in a poor, possibly life-threatening, state of health. Like many symptoms of real disease (e.g., diarrhea) it's something that will worsen the situation and needs to be treated. But it's not necessarily the underlying cause. If the real source of illness is something that won't resolve on its own then focusing too much on the symptoms is at best a form of palliative care. At worst, it exacerbates the situation by lulling you into believing that you're addressing the problem when you're actually allowing it to continue unchecked.
Nope. That limitation doesn't exist for simply logging into the app store app and installing my purchased apps.

There are much more signifcant apps on the Mac app store than the simple .99 cent ones.
That's one awful lot of parantheses for a hello world.
No. This is not hurting users in the long run. What will hurt is having tens of apps, all having separate voice recognition software. It is correct to have only one. Like it is correct to have only one keyboard. Not tens of different keyborads with every app having his own.
Another Ruby vs Python post. I wrote a few about 4 years ago, and so has everyone else. It seems to be a Rubyist/Pythonist's version of a Bar Mitzvah.
You make it sound like there's a societal cruise control that magically improves our quality of living. I'm glad the activists of history didn't share your sentiment.
Doctest.js: a humane Javascript test framework
Yes, you can actually click on their username and it takes you to their office which shows their full roster. We're currently working on adding a link on the poll to make it easy that says "See full roster". Thanks!
"Writing code in this style is perfectly safe if you do it correctly."

That's a tautology.

In general you can't count on code being written "correctly", so this isn't a defense. It is better to have systems that degrade gracefully in the face of humans and their idiosyncrasies, rather than those that fail-unsafe, because you can't build your security system on the assumption that your code will be written by superhumans.
I thought it was a bad idea to synchronize on the object your modifying.
That was the one which bothered me the most too.

But I think it depends -- if you're still only a team of 7, and the 7th hire still got 3% equity (probably not realistic?), then everyone's got enough skin in the game where you probably shouldn't be taking vacations too often.

But if the 7th hire has 0.1% equity, then there should absolutely be a clear vacation policy. It's exceedingly important that clear rules are laid down for what's "fair".
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4442902

Here's the previous discussion on here of the same article.
Appcelerator launches innovation fund
They can be used for program synthesis. That is, given some high-level specification, you can use an SMT solver to generate code fitting that specification. You can also use them to verify that some code does fit a specification and, if it doesn't, to find the part of the code causing the actual problem (the minimal unsat core).

A particular example would be to take some existing code with holes (just parts left out) and some assertions about the code's behavior, encode both as logic formulas and try to find a satisfying assignment for the holes. When you have a possible assignment, you can verify it with the same encoding. You can then use the satisfying assignment to fill in the holes in the initial program, which are ideally very tedious to code by hand.
People say "Apple just does just marketing" like marketing is easy or unimportant. But, you know what, Apple's success really is about marketing, and that's a good thing. Apple haven't made that many purely technical innovations, but what they have done is look at new technology, figure out what people might want to do with it, tweak the technology to focus on doing that thing, and then explain to people how Apple's product can help them do something they want to do. This is "marketing," it's what makes technological innovations accessible to people, and it's something Apple should be praised for.
Its true, I'm amazed they are able to get away with it too. Microsoft simply bundled software, but never did it outright prevent competition on its OS. Apples closed garden is outright blocking competition... How is no one looking into this?
Where's the siri API then?
Not true. In the official court transcript the question was open ended:

THE COURT: Okay. Welcome back. Please take a seat.
We had a few more departures in your absence.
Let's continue with the questions. The next question is,
have you or a family member or someone very close to you
ever been involved in a lawsuit, either as a plaintiff,
a defendant, or as a witness?
This can far more easily be done by topological sorting.